For the past decade or so, Polish musician Michal Jacaszek has been exploring a new, resolutely modern chapter in Eastern Europe’s long, storied love affair with classical music. His creations are painstakingly crafted collages of electronic textures and baroque instrumentation, harpsichords being swarmed by woolly static one minute and pulled apart by billowing wind the next. A push-and-pull tension runs deep and constant throughout. Ambient music is rarely so sonically challenging. Jacaszek has recorded for Ghostly International, Miasmah, Gusstaff Records and Experimedia and other labels. This is his first release for Touch.

Michał Jacaszek writes:

“When poets and writers declare their enchantment for the forms of nature, they often use musical terms as metaphors. Visual artists’ creations often resemble graphic partitas, when recapturing the rhythms of landscapes. Confirming, in a way, these musical intuitions, composers write great music deeply inspired by birdsongs, wind rustlings, waves repetitions etc.

Making “Cataloguge des Arbres”, my ambition was to join this broad artistic movement devoted to natural phenomena and find my own way to describe trees: their forms, atmosphere and mystery. I have started with “open air” recordings, capturing mainly leaves” rustlings – from different distances, in different locations and weather conditions. This collection of nature recordings was transformed into a kind of “organic drone” and becomes a main background for instrumental and voice improvisations. My initial inspiration here was Olivier Messiaen’s’ bird songs transcriptions for piano – the composer’s work title “Catalogue d’Oiseaux” I have paraphrased on my album . A piano, clarinets, violin and percussion parts, performed by the Kwartludium ensemble, were electronically processed, and afterwards all this electro-acoustic material was turned into a collection of 8 soundscapes – forgotten songs performed secretly by my beloved trees.”

Author and producer of electroacoustic music, composer of soundtracks and theatre music, and sound artist. He is a curator of C3 Festival /Club Contemporary Classical/. Member of Polish Society for Electro-acoustic Music. Michał Jacaszek lives in Gdansk, Poland. Jacaszek gained Grand Prix at “Dwa Teatry” Festival for music composed for the play “Golgota Wrocławska” directed by Jan Komasa. “Walking underwater” a documentary by E. Kubarska with music by Jacaszek has recently been awarded The Special Jury Prize at Hot Docs Film Festival in Toronto.

He has performed in USA (Unsound New York, Communikey, Hopscotch), in Canada (Mutek ), in Great Britain (Fertilizer Festival, Apha Ville Festival), in Nederlands (Urbanexplorer Festival), in Belgium (Fereejen Festival), Portugal, Sweden (Volt Festival), Slovakia, Germany, Ukraine and Russia (Electro-Mechanica Festival); as well as in Poland at the most important festivals: Heineken Opener Festival, Off Festival, Unsound Festival, Astigmatic.

You can read an interview here and a review in Polyphonia by here by Łukasz Komia, both in Polish Incendiary (UK):

Sometimes listening to things that sound like everything and nothing is just the best. This record purports to evoke the sounds and feel of the forest; and in doing so uses a whole host of classical and modern techniques. In keeping with a lot of modern classical there is a direct link with the past masters, and here the link to Messiaen’s Catalogue d’Oiseaux can’t be a coincidence. In many ways Catalogue des Arbres has a feel of a work of the late 19th century. In its approach it’s reminiscent of Debussy’s La Mer, the naïve jungle images of Henri Rousseau, or the weird phantasmagorical images of Odlion Redon. It’s also drawing heavily on a deep seated, very Polish love of the forest; especially the Polish relationship with the primeval tracts of forest such as Białowieża, one that has shaped that country’s worldview since the year dot.

But it’s also a great listen on a lot of very accessible levels; at turns incredibly quiet and restful in other passages very, very theatrical and grand, and a record that touches on a whole host of musical conceits to make its point. Despite it being deserving of reams of text as to its making, (as there is a great deal of background and intellectual hinterlands that were explored in this LP’s recording) you can just enjoy the utter sensuousness of Catalogue des Arbres. A Book of Lake or Circling both have a jazzy, post-rock feel that could sit very comfortably on a Miles Davies record. The cracking, sparky and hypnotic Kingdom is really close to Conny Schnitzler’s Divine musings. There’s also a fair bit of the bright, pinpoint aestheticism of the Radiophonic Workshop in here, or the sleaziness of Studio G, for that matter. If we are talking about feel as being the driving motif, then we should mention the buildup on Green Hour, which is marvellous; a slowly creeping piano coda creates a structure for a wider range of crackling and fizzing noises, which are balanced against clarinet and violin. Elsewhere, From a Seashell threatens to explain itself throughout but never does so; preferring to build up an increasingly suffocating aura of suspense. The brilliant chinks of the triangle are wonderful counterpoints to the creepy backlight.

So a great, disturbing, enervating listen, don’t feel intimidated; and in the words of the immortal Brian Clough, get in there! [Richard Foster]

Norman Records (UK):

I have some great stuff on this week. Last week was a little underwhelming but a new Touch release is always gonna to have this old pooch wagging his eager tail.

I won’t harp on too much about this guy’s work. I have a huge place in my heart for the astonishing ‘Treny’ and also the ‘Glimmer’ album he delivered for Ghostly was pretty awe-inspiring too. Michał Jacaszek’s material is a passionate fusion of electronic textural manipulation, smoky chamber jazz and abstract classical rushes. Much like fellow visionaries Deaf Center, this talented Pole fuses his worlds into magical ambient soundscapes that are as engrossing and otherworldly as you could care for.

Unfortunately I cannot quite make out who the significant other featured here, Kwartludium, actually is. I have discovered though that the effortless glory of rustling tress and the majestic weather-beaten landscape make up the main body of inspiration here. He’s been out in all conditions apparently gathering sonic detritus with which to embellish his occasionally unsettling experiments in lushness. This is like a musical interpretation of a Tarkovsky film. Lots of rustling and watery effects. You have no idea what’s gonna come at you next from out the shadows! Once again I find myself drifting off to perfectly poised and almost cinematic music with wonderful jazzy flourishes, organic ephemera and a tender layer of processed field recordings. A lovely way to spend a Friday lunchtime!
Graceful, windswept, mysterious and gorgeously rendered, this is another sublime entry into the eventual fine legacy of Mr. Jacaszek. [Brian]

From the outside it may seem that Touch always works with the same artists and to some extent that’s probably true. What’s wrong with that? They act as a proper record label, not working on a project-to-project basis, but push a limited number of artists. But sometimes an entirely new name pops up, such as Michal Jacaszek from Poland, who is a composer of soundtracks and theatre music, as well as a curator for various festivals. His previous work was released by Ghostly International Miasmah, Gustaff Records and Experimedia, although I must say I didn’t hear any of that. Here he works with a quartet called Kwartludium: Dagna Sadkowska on violin, Michal Gorczynski on clarinet and bass clarinet, Pawel Nowicki on percussion and Piotr Nowicki on grand piano. Much like composers have tried to describe animals through instruments (Messiaen, Saint-Saens), Jacaszek wanted to describe trees, ‘their forms, atmosphere and mystery’. He started with the recording of leaves rustling and wrote the notes out for the quartet and then, in the final stage, treated everything in a way that is owed to the world of electro-acoustic music. The 441 Hz Chmaber Choir performed some voice parts. Great story, fine music, which carefully balances on the modern classical on one side and electro-acoustic music on the other side. Jacaszek really makes his sounds – whatever source – to have a rustling character, such as in ‘Garden (Les Sureaux)’ – which rustles all around – the field recordings, the percussion instruments, but also the other instruments making similar gestures. Most of the time this is played introspectively, but not dark, doomy. It’s airy music, open, like a mild summer breeze (and with today’s sunny weather I can exactly know how that feels), meandering through space, without getting weightless or new age inspired. Jacaszek knows how to create music that is partly gritty, a bit dirty, just off the beaten track. I’m never too fond of anything that is even remotely modern classical, but I must say: this is great! [FdeW]

Fluid Radio (UK):

The dark trunks are as grey as bleached stone. Their dull, shaded leaves perform a slow, almost balletic routine in the pitch-black of the night, absent of white stars. It’s done in private, with only a couple of nocturnal eyes glinting from beyond. Natural rhythms sway in time with their slender arms, a hundred trees participating in an ancient ritual. Their rhythm is true, tried and tested. Their trunks are thick bodies that populate the planet. Instruments are bodies, too. With clarinets, violins and piano performed by the Kwartludium ensemble, the sublime beings house the music before it’s released into the wild.

Trees have been around much longer than we have and are considered sacred the world over, minus the brutal deforestation that we see today, a sad reminder that all is not well. Oaks were once worshiped by European druids, and Redwoods were an integral part of American Indian ritual. They are stony, monolithic, breathing life into the world. And polish musician Michal Jacaszek breathes life into his music. It takes on a new, ashen form. The percussive shaking sounds like a quivering branch; leaves rustle in the dead of night. In the natural, wooded house of leaves, birds nest and nestle, taking refuge. They harbor life and oxygen. A leafy tree in its prime will produce as much oxygen in a season as ten people inhale in a year.

Creaking timbres and dissonant piano notes drip with a grey, murky mystery. Recurring chords cloud the music, and low, ominous bursts of piano rumble like tropical thunder. The strings seep tears of discontent. Jacaszek has chosen to explore the natural beauty of trees – ‘their form, atmosphere and mystery’. Their beauty has been much admired and, as a result, is often taken for granted. Jacaszek concentrates on the darker, twisted roots underneath the surface – something that we don’t normally see – and the well hidden secrets they keep. The music is detailed; close up shavings that scrape against the trunk of the tree. The trees are alive, mixing in with the sound of steady rainfall and the chirp of the birds. Percussion patters down, filling up empty cans with a light, tinny sound. A sung chorus comes out of nowhere, but it’s a leafy language.

Catalogue des Arbres is a tonal forest, a dense jungle rooted with slithering shrubbery and vines that snake their way through the undergrowth. The notes seem to know their way around this place. The clarinet isn’t as bright as it once was, the tone becoming noxious, falling under a dreamy enchantment after a chance meeting with Maleficent. Wooden carvings litter the side of the trunk, signs of cherished teenage love. I <3 u 4eva.
Jacaszek recorded the leaves at various locations, distances and in different weather conditions. This adds a chilling authenticity to the mystery currently developing in the brooding glow of the dark room, where Jacaszek’s photographs find their form. Strange black shapes appear beside the trees, apparitions that hone in on their victim. The trees intend to keep their secrets; you need to be on your guard in Jacaszek’s neck of the woods.

The inner sleeve quotes eight lines of early 20th century Polish poet Bolesław Leśmian’s ‘Sonnet’, which tells of ‘a songlike sweetness’ that ‘pours from the forest’, in what could be justifiably described as a Romantic style. It’s in this context that Polish musician Michaɫ Jacaszek, here with the assistance of instrumental ensemble Kwartludium attempts to explore the relationship between artist and nature.

The resulting work is subtle, but that doesn’t mean it’s lacking in atmosphere or interest. Incorporating elements of jazz into a supple, cinematic soundscape of creeping tension and ponderous intangibles. A teetering piano hangs on the precipice above a floating glockenspiel, eddying around dissonant woodwind. Heavy drones build, scraping strings ebb and flow and transition from dark to light. Cymbals like rain wash over a host of incidentals.

Touch had a very productive summer in 2014. The focus of this recommendation is an album by Jacaszek & Kwartludium, titled Catalogue des Arbres. The former has been a favorite of mine since the discovery in 2008 by Erik K Skodvin for his Miasmah label, and the introduction of Treny into the world, courtesy of Gusstaff Records. Even though it was Jacaszek’s third proper studio album, it was my very first acquaintance, and that superb modern classical release is still a cherished piece in my collection. With his 2011 Glimmer, Jacaszek managed to appear on Ghostly International label, and now, it is a true marvel to see him among the Touch family of dearest artists.

For Catalogue des Arbres, Michał Jacaszek engages Kwartludium ensemble, to perform all of the instrumental compositions, which he further processes with barely recognizable elements and minimal effects, to turn these eight electro-acoustic soundscapes into “forgotten songs performed secretly by my beloved trees“. Kwartludium, a Polish contemporary music ensemble, comprised of Dagna Sadkowska on violin, Michał Górczyński on clarinet, Paweł Nowicki on percussion, and Piotr Nowicki on the piano, last appeared on my radar when they collaborated with Scanner (the very same Robin Rimbaud) on Graphic Scores for DUX in 2013.

Although most of Jacaszek’s past output usually swirls around the murky vapor of nostalgia, the condition of Catalogue des Arbres slowly slides into a darker, more abstract and dingier space. Based on the field recordings of natural phenomena, the artist aims to create an artistic document capturing this nature through an acoustic lens, if you will, from various locations, distances and weather conditions. Further inspiration comes from Olivier Messiaen‘s bird song transcriptions for piano, similarly titled Catalogue d’Oiseaux, composed in 1958 as a tone poem evoking the landscape, its colors and atmosphere.
“When poets and writers declare their enchantment for the forms of nature, they often use musical terms as metaphors. Visual artists’ creations often resemble graphic partitas, when recapturing the rhythms of landscapes. Making “Cataloguge des Arbres”, my ambition was to join this broad artistic movement devoted to natural phenomena and find my own way to describe trees: their forms, atmosphere and mystery.”

The soundscapes breathe with water, wind, and whispering timbers, punctuated by scattered piano chords, brooding bass clarinet and wondering violins. The resulting sound is sparse, drony, smokey and often dim. Like a soundtrack to a diffused and sharp contrasted film noir, Catalogue des Arbres lingers in the foreground with its lo-fi organic twilight, until it gently dissipates and melts away. The album’s artwork, once again, photographed and composed by Jon Wozencroft, conveys a sense of an early quiet hour on a dark and stormy day. A time and place that trees, I’m sure, don’t mind. Highly recommended. [HC]

Chain D.L.K. (USA):

The integration of instrumental and ambient music with field recordings and sound of nature has almost become a cliche so that the discriminating factor is the aesthaetic quality of such an integration and the aesthaetics that Polish electroacoustic musician Michal Jacascek and the ensemble Kwartludium (Dagna Sadkowska on violin, clarinet player Michal Gorczynski, Pawel Nowicki on percussions and pianist Piotr Nowicki) convey on this “Catalogue des Arbres” (French for “Catalogue of Trees”) is undoubtedly sterling from this point of view. The choice of a French title is not a matter of mannerism, but it’s just a quotation of “Catalogue d’oiseaux” (“Bird catalogue”) by French composer Olivier Messiaen, the forerunning oeuvre of the so-called biomusic where he incorporated the delicate chirps and tweets by thirteen different birds into likewise delicate compositions. By reversing the order that many poets and writers followed by using musical metaphors to render their enchantment for nature, Jacascek and Kwartludium turn into interpreter of the hidden sound of trees, whose presence is not limited to a bunch of field recordings but they seem to mark the sound of this project since the opening “Sigh (Les Peupliers)”, where the musicians manage to render the serene magnificence of poplars whose elevation got evoked by 441 Hz Chamber Choir sylvan-like voices. A certain anxiety creeps into the record on the disquieting lullaby of the following “Green Hour”, which evokes the so-called natural deficit disorder or Louv’s hypothesis about some behavioral problems caused by the disconnection between humans (mainly children) and nature, and on “A book of lake (Roseliere)”, where percussions seem to render the flowing of reed beds and clarinet could resemble the sound of some buzzing small inhabitants of wetlands where reed wildly grows. Fittingly, wind instruments had a prominent function in “Garden (Les Sureaux)”, where they quote elderberry, whose branches are traditionally used for a number of flutes and wind instruments in Eastern Europe; moreover the track sounds like rendering the venomous beauty of sambucus, whose parts mainly includes cyanide. A similar contrasting suggestion comes from the listening of “From a seashell”, where the enchanting sonic elements sounds like the clash between the beauty of those resounding forms and the circumstance that those exoskeletons are like abandoned houses or cemeteries. A feeling of vague dismay and digginess trickles from the following tracks “Circling (Le Pre)” and “Anthem (La ForÃªt)”, which precede the astonishing finale of “Kingdom (Les ChÃªnes, Les Bouleaux)” here 441 Hz Chamber Choir emphasizes the quivering atmosphere of the soundscape again. [ Vito Camarretta]

Gonzo Circus (Netherlands):

The Quietus (UK):

The vast majority of releases covered above are self-released, perhaps confirming the suspicion that the more outré oeuvres are not as sustainable by the now old school model of independent labels and publishers as they once were. Two grand examples to the contrary are Austria’s Editions Mego and UK’s Touch who both consistently and relentlessly continue to support and release fringe artists working in the liminal space between music and sound art. Touch’s latest two releases are prime examples of this.
Catalogue des Arbres, a collaboration between the Polish sound artist Michal Jacaszek and the Kwartludium quartet, sees Jacaszek’s field recordings of trees – their branches’ and leaves’ rustling responses to rain and wind – placed in concert with subtly processed recordings of Kwartludium’s violin, clarinet, percussion and piano. The resultant patina is a verdant ebb and flow of organically moving matter, fertile and furtive, whose considered diffusion brings its forest textures to the fore, spreading its moss, vines, tendrils and branches into your listening environment. [Russell Cuzner]

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